Skipper
by royslady51
Summary: During a companionless time, the 8th Doctor finds himself on a planet filled with young children forced into battling merciless horrors to survive. He intervenes immediately.


Skipper

The child rode the winds that swirled outside the TARDIS as it materialized, following the timeship across the face of the planet where the girl had met it. It was like no display the Doctor had _ever _seen. She rode a slip of wooden bark, surfing on the winds...soon enough she was joined by other children. All riding a scrap of bark as they followed the Tardis across the skies...they beckoned him to follow, when they approached a maelstrom of winds, to climb higher still and then, poised on the top of the downward plummeting winds, they rode them to the base of a canyon.

It was a good thing he was already crazy...his timeship told him these kids _were _the emergency, then followed the children without any help from him...and all he could do was brace himself for the sudden stop at the bottom...that never came. There was a fast, tight left turn at the base and as they shot around it in the childrens' wake, they found an area of calm that had the kids hovering for a few seconds over a place where there was a pile of the bark they used, to drop it there and then they turned a mid-air summersault and landed on a bit of clear ground.

The TARDIS came to rest a few hundred feet away and he waited until his nerves were settled before he opened the doors and poked his head out. He was in a village populated only by children. Some of the older ones that he'd followed in were carrying babes toward a center where other children arriving from other slipbark areas were also bringing them. He stepped out and squatted just outside the doors to watch. No adults. None, _not one_...what was going on here? It took a while before even the oldest would approach him...and even that wasn't saying much. If that little lad was ten, he'd be much surprised.

"Why you here?" The boy wanted to know. "All kids here gifted, no for you. Drewqa not like Gifted us. Drewqa kill baby with Gift, we take, raise, no kill. Why you come, Drewqa?"

"Not Drewqa, not kill kids." He sounded offended, because he was. "Time Lord, me."

"What Time Lord, look Drewqa. Grown not?"

"Different kind of people, grown-not Drewqa." He could see the boy was trying to wrap his young head around that concept.

"Not Drewqa raid?"

"No. Take to safety, off world, away from Drewqa."

"Some must stay, every year, more Gifted babes born, exposed, left to die. We not find all...Drewqa get some."

"Be back when we find the rest of those infants." He jumped up and ran back into the TARDIS, Which vanished faster than she _ever _had, as both of them were horrified. And at the end of it, there were three that their deaths were fixed before the bodies were found, though some thirty more they brought back to the boy and the others of his age group. So simple a thing to prove to the older children that he _wasn't _a Drewqa...a baby killer, in other words. It took a few days, but then the Camp of Lost Children were all within the TARDIS and when the real baby killers came, there was nothing there but a blue police box and it vanished as they stood there and stared.

The Doctor sent a burst to the Shadow Proclaimation, the killers were not of the same species as the children, who were human, all of them. This was a level below Earth...a four...and the killers were Dractal, human eaters that preferred the youngest. He had stayed to get a good look at the child-killers. The report generated a planetwide clean out, only humans were allowed to remain and even then, official Watchers were left to guard the rest of the population...mostly other camps of children rescuing infants from horrors.

Only the oldest had figured out a rudimentary form of speech. Subliminals as they slept soon fixed that, replacing the hesitant attempts with intergalactic basic. Most of the kids he found homes for by placing them in human friendly orphanages...except two. The boy that had approached, expecting to be killed and by doing so give the others a chance to flee and the girl he'd seen first. Jackie and Rose were going to be in for a bit of a shock when he got back to pick her up.


End file.
